Archive for the ‘Dream Journal’ Tag

I don’t know how I know this. I just do. This dream must be inspired somehow by Avatar and its own influences. I’m in a tent with a young girl, maybe 16 or 17, so shades of Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas are in there too. The Western motif appears again. She is my guide to this new and strange culture. She talks, but I cannot remember what she said.

Next scene is in what seems like a ruined temple, although for some reason it is referred to as a “church” in the dream. It then gets very cinematic, as a “crane shot” rising above the temple reveals it has no ceiling, and I see there is a large courtyard .

Inside, a splendid sight reveals itself. I see men, and only men, wearing colorful wings. Wings in red and green, mostly. And the wings are large, wide, sprawling, like those of a hawk. But I am told, or simply knows, that the wings are not part of their body, but were simply attached to their backs by some method. Nevertheless, they seem to have no problem flying – well, not exactly flying, they mostly hover above the ground for a couple of seconds, fly a few meters, and then land back down again.
The court is full of people. It seems to be some kind of a festival. or a celebration.

And then, like in the end of Raiders Of The Lost Arc, the sense of wonder turns horror. I notice old men stand at the outskirts of the yard with their mouths wide open, like the clowns in an amusement park booth where you need to shoot water into their mouth to blow up balloons. Here, archers try to aim their arrows right into the old men mouths. I watch how one of them succeeds, and the old man, his throat pierced, falls back into the bushes. I notice that those same men, with their mouths open, are not tied or shackled in any kind of way, but stand there willingly, their mouths open and ready….

There are other horrendous things going on, but I mostly just hear about them, and don’t see them, and I will spare the reader of the details. Suffice it to say the place is a place of sacrifice and ritual, as if I’ve stumbled onto a Mayan pyramid. There is certainly something in this scene that reminds one of certain Native-American cultures. It’s beautiful and brutal and the same time, and it seems that the people of the this tribe are perfectly fine with it, and they’ve been fine with it for hundreds of years.

I am much more of an observer in this dream. I’m not taking part in anything that’s going on. I am the visitor, the stranger, the explorer.

But I know I’m on another planet. I can just feel it. Does it make any sense? Does it?

They’re putting white table cloths and candles on the tables and I ask this woman what’s going on and she says “They’re celebrating Hanuka”. “They” meaning the Jews. I remember pegging her as a racist.
I know I need to go out because I have the house all for myself. It’s a long weekend because of Rosh Hashana and everybody will be out. “Everybody” means my family.

Then I go outside. It’s night. I get lost. Can’t find the streetcar stop. Someone approaches with a pickup truck – I’m standing on this sandy pit and he drives backwards and doesn’t see me and almost runs me over.

I go down to the fork in the road and choose another street, there’s police or something like that blocking the street.
Coincidentally, this is the way to my work. Apparently in the dream I’m equating “going to work” with “going home”.

Somehow I find myself in the station but I don’t recognize it. It’s white and clean and I see stairs spiraling up. It’s more like a fire station then a subway station. On the stairs I find this pale green cloth, or piece of clothing. Can’t remember exactly. It’s wrapped up in a nylon bag, I think. I take it out of the wrap and wear it because I think I need to if I want to get on the train. Then I realize it doesn’t even fit me and I take it off. At that point this guy comes out of a room and offers me coffee – expensive kind of coffee, with foam and all that crap – in a small china cup, on a plate, like in a coffee shop. The room where he was in, there are other people there. Looks like the lunch room or something, or the kitchenette. I ask him where’s the train and he tells me.

The platform is outside, and it’s day time. It looks like it came out of a western. Bushes, and rocks and pebbles. I’m looking for a place to put my coffee cup (which I hardly touched) and eventually just puts it on a rock, but then I look to the side and see there’s a bunch of similar cups on the sandy ground not far from where I stand, so I go and put the plate with the cup on the ground next to the other cups.
At some point this petite Asian girl comes along. She hugs two ugly monstrous green lizards with her arms, and between her fingers she holds a wreathing, live cockroach (recurring symbol #1: Bugs). She proceeds to put the cockroach on the ground and then releases the lizards after it. She explains to us that she’s an artist who creates tattoos on the ground. When the green lizards kill the cockroach they use this greenish goo which they shoot from their mouths. The girl uses this goo to create her paintings. She turns over some rocks to show us other works she did in the area. You know how you usually find snakes and scorpions if you turn over a rock in a western? Well, here you find “earth tattoos”. The paintings themselves are imprinted on the bottom of the rock, and not on the ground, and interestingly enough, they’re not green but pretty colorful. That’s all I remember from them.
Then the girl collects her little monsters and the dead, squashed cockroach and walks away. I remember feeling disgusted.

Then I go back to the platform and wait for the train. I meet this kid, maybe 15 years old, and he says something about “filmmakers don’t have to wait for trains” or “don’t have to” something. I don’t remember exactly what. I tell him some filmmakers do. Oh, and he’s there with his mother.

Then the train arrives and we all get in. Of course, the inside of the train is quite different than a subway train. It’s wide, the seats are arranged in rows in the middle of the space, and there’s a screen on the wall facing the seats (recurring symbol #2: screens). The interior reminds me more of a ship then of a train. There’s other stuff going on in the train, some talk about something, with the kid and his mother, but I don’t remember what. There’s also something showing on the screen, I think, but I don’t remember what it was either. I do remember that at some point, either on the train or afterward, I’m meeting a couple of my friends, a husband and wife, and joins them in my hurry to get home, maybe they’ll show me the way, but we end up in the same pub where the dream began (now that I think of it, the pub also has this strong Western vibe to it. Wooden tables and chairs, and just the layout of a saloon).
They look very tired. I almost feel guilty for dragging them along.
Anyway, it’s night again, and the pub is pretty empty. We sit and talk, I don’t remember about what. But they keep telling me to lower my voice because I disturb this lonely, middle-aged (bald?) guy sitting next to us. So I try and lower my voice.
At some point I realize I finally went the wrong way again, so I tell them I have to go, and then I leave. Outside, There’s heavy rain. I open my black umbrella but it doesn’t help, the rain is so hard the umbrella is actually sagging in my hand, and the pole is leaning to one side and almost breaking.
So I go back inside.
I’m not sure what comes before or after here, but I find myself talking with the bald guy and apologizing if I disturbed him, he seems depressed and tells me about the incident where this Arab guy came to him earlier and threatened him with a knife. According to my response, I was supposed to have witnessed this incident, but if you read back, you’ll see I have no recollection of that in the dream sequence. I proceed to tell him that the guy was just showing off and that he had no real intention of hurting him.

Then I find that my friends have switched tables. In order to get to where they’re seating now I need to go through this attractive couple who are blocking the pass. I ask them politely to let me pass and they politely do. Then the guy stands up and mentions my shirt. Apparently, I’m wearing my Scarface shirt, or a version of it. He talks about the quote which is on the shirt. It’s a real quote from the movie: “Say hello to my little friend”. But it doesn’t appear on my real shirt. But on my dream shirt, apparently it is. I look down and see it written in small letters. I smile at the guy. He seems to be ecstatic by the shirt. His blond wife/girlfriend also smiles, I think.

I join my friends but then I notice someone coming in. It’s a girl. She’s very familiar to me but I can’t peg her down a 100 percent. She’s brunette, with short hair, and a beauty spot above her lip, like Madonna’s or Cindy Crawford’s. She’s looking around and then notices me and starts asking me something (I think she says she was late for something but I’m not sure). Suddenly she stops, as if she forgot the etiquette, and hugs me. I hug her back and plant a kiss on her cheek. She lets go of me and gets back to her business, which is asking her question, which for the life of me I can’t remember.

I also don’t think I had an answer for her.

I go back to my friends while the girl sits in another table, alone. My friends tell me something like “what are you doing sitting here with us, go talk with this girl.”

But I don’t think I’m going. I think the dream ended at this point, in the anti-climactic way in which dreams often do.